The Blind Gods
Copyright© 2025 by Wau
Chapter 95: Caliban
Ada coughs up sand ... she is dying of thirst, with a terrible headache. Alpha leans over her again. He has dug a shallow trench in the sand that carries the water from this waveless ocean.
She tastes it. It’s neither salty nor alkaline. It’s muddy water, but delicious to someone dying of thirst. Ada takes a little, gathers her strength somewhat, then crawls on all fours toward the sea to get more.
Her suit is filthy. And she’s hungry. What the hell is going on? Sitting on a sandbank, she looks around.
A sandbank, planted with a tree covered in moss, holds a stretch of clear water that laps against grey rocks occasionally streaked with red. Inland, the hill quickly gives way to high passes between peaks lost in the clouds. Vegetation is everywhere-but so is silence.
No animals, no fish, no insects, no birds, not even a mosquito. From time to time Ada hears a branch crack in the nearby forest. She washes her suit and leans over the water: the Alexandrite has slipped onto the seabed, three meters deep. The power unit has broken off from the ship ... she won’t be able to fix it. No matter-she wasn’t planning to leave right away anyway.
She can’t swim, but she weighs herself down with stones and makes several trips back and forth to open the hold and retrieve some tools: a distress beacon, a few nutrition bars, a knife, her transient FAM, and some small gear stuffed into a shoulder bag. Her morale hadn’t exactly been low-just battered by fear-but she gathers her courage again.
When she resurfaces, she sees Kukth sucking on a fruit with a snakeskin peel and pinkish flesh, and she picks one herself. Almost tasteless, but it fills her stomach.
And where to go now? She slowly scans the coastline-long enough for a sea breeze to rise and a darker cloud to threaten rain ... but it’s swept away, and the cloud layer, that pleasant white sky, settles back in. The silence remains unsettling.
She sees something far off, on the beach-a metallic structure ... yes, through the haze, a silvery reflection. Onward.
The sand is soft-the air too, and this natural warmth, for Ada has known few hot planets, feels pleasant, even though it burns her pale skin. They follow the coastal ridges, in the shade of the snakeskin fruit trees, which seem to be the dominant vegetation alongside a few grey shrubs. Between the fruit and the water, she could live here a long time if things went wrong, and she knows that Salman, or at worst Andreï ... but she’d rather it be Salman, yes, Salman, would come to find her.
In the meantime, she will have opened the Gates of Empyrean, and she will have seen what lies beyond. That’ll make quite a story to tell Salman.
They pass a clearing, then the outer edge of a lagoon filled with immense algae, then climb over some rocks. Next comes an isthmus between a lake fed by a river so torrential you can hear its flow from a kilometer away, and the infinite freshwater ocean, as the sun gently sinks and reddens the clouds.
Alpha, who hops silently behind her, makes a sound that seems like a human word ... but she can’t make it out. She turns, startled, toward him. Is she going mad from this silence?